Posts

Forms Forms Forms

Seems like no matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to get away from forms. Web forms, paper forms, mobile forms, etc… they’re absolutely everywhere.

I guess that’s what comes from the need to collect data. And the whole Internet thing with browsers sending data back to the server and what not.

I recently brought on a new client that needs help with scheduling a series of appointments and adding them to a calendar. Since they use Google Calendar, Gmail, etc I thought it’d be pretty easy to setup a simple Google Form backed by a Google Sheet to collect data.

Useful Software

I’ve been going down a path of building software that people don’t use lately. To be honest I’ve been doing that a few more time than feels good to admit. I know that not everything I build will be used by a lot of people, heck most things I build aren’t even used by me, but enough is enough.

I feel it’s time to try and only work on things that I’m getting paid for, or people will actually use.

To that end I whipped out the DVD Pila! code and fixed some bugs and added a web socket to listen for and send events for video playback.

My first experience with web sockets was building a realtime Note taking app for a local hackathon. It was very cool using Socket.io to update a note using a web interface, Android app, and an iOS app at the same time.

My thought is to build a DVD Pila! Remote app at some point, but the first step is to integrate a web socket server into the existing Rails app.

Data Manipulation

It didn’t take long before the need to adjust the data on the server sent by the Habit App needed to be adjusted.

For whatever reason, ok there’s a good reason and it’s because I wasn’t careful in sending data to the server, the habit data on the server I was working with was overwritten. The feature I’m working on is to populate the Habits if the Settings for URL and Username are set and there aren’t any configured. We’ll get to that in a minute though.

In the meantime whipping up some Node + Express + Jade templates was surprisingly very fun…